Amazon Reveals Cloud Drive API

Amazon announced on Tuesday the launch of a public REST API platform for its Cloud Drive.

This API will allow third-party developers to easily integrate Cloud Drive into their own services, thus simplifying upload, download, and manipulation of content to the cloud, and enabling developers to focus more on the app and less on storage.

And while simplifying things on the storage front, Amazon has complicated things on the app registration front. Developers need to get their app whitelisted by Amazon, if they want to build it using the Amazon Cloud Drive API.

A post on the Amazon developer site says, “when you build an app using the Amazon Cloud Drive API you need to submit a request to have your app whitelisted.

“During this process you need to provide details about your app, whether you need read and/or write access, and the type of content you want to have access to in a customer account such as images, videos, or documents.“

The app must then pass a review before going public, “your app must be submitted for review before it is placed into production, used at a demo, hackathon, or as an internal tool.“

“When your app is submitted for review, we will verify permissions, run a call-pattern analysis, implementation of a back-off strategy, and whether or not your app complies with our Brand Guidelines and App Distribution and Services Agreement.”

The new API is Amazon’s latest attempt to make the Cloud Drive more competitive in the cloud storage wars.